After reading report after report after report from analyst firm after analyst firm after analyst firm for the last decade or so on how more BI is the answer (it’s usually not), I was very pleasantly surprised by this recent post by Lora Cecere (ex-AMR) of the Altimeter Group over on Supply Chain Shaman on why you should free the data to answer the questions that you don’t know to ask.
The first paragraph captures the situation perfectly:
It happens all the time. IT says to line of business leaders, “Tell me what you need for Business Intelligence (BI), and I will go find the right technologies“. The issue is that we don’t know, and we will not know soon. We only know that applications are changing and that the data is growing exponentially. The answer to the question of: “What is the right data architecture for demand-driven value networks?” is “It is evolving. We don’t know“.
This means that no fixed BI or OLAP solution is ever going to solve your problem! I don’t care if it can handle and/or is designed for geo-spatial data, sentiment analysis, loyalty programs, POS, or CRM. It won’t work. That’s why, as I keep stressing, you need a real data analysis solution that can cube, dimension, map, slice, dice, augment, expand, re-map, re-cube, and start again on data sets of millions of transactions in real time on your high end laptop or workstation. Until each of your analysts has this type of solution on their desktops, they’ll never get the intelligence they’re looking for.